Tasting history: West African Groundnut Stew

From the cookbook Jubilee: Recipes from Two Hundred Years of African American Cooking, this comforting stew features chicken, aromatics, tomatoes, spices and peanut butter. Recipe below.

IF YOU’RE A READER OF FOOD BLOGS, YOU PROBABLY ALSO HAVE COOKBOOKS. Maybe even a fairly impressive collection. By her own count, Toni Tipton-Martin has “rescued nearly 400 Black cookbooks—many of them rare—dating back to 1827.” To Tipton-Martin, a James Beard Book Award-winning food and nutrition journalist, these are more than cookbooks. They are a history of African Americans, primarily women, told through the filter of food and the kitchen.

As she says on her website, “Those pioneering women in early America worked under stone-age conditions in the plantation kitchen house, and yet they were creative and expressive. They honed their kitchen skills the way culinary students do today: by observation and apprenticeship. The culinary arts were in most cases the only way they could express creativity, independence, and maintain their self-esteem. Cooking also increased their understanding of math, chemistry, and science, which they passed along to their kids.”

In 2015, Tipton-Martin’s singular collection was the basis of her book The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. It catalogs more than 150 books in her collection chronologically, from that “rare 1827 house servant’s manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics.” And it seeks to overcome stereotypical, demoralizing portraits of “lowly, surly servants toiling away in southern kitchens.”

Published in 2019, her newest book, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, is a celebration of African American cuisine. The more than 100 recipes in Jubilee are gleaned from her collection; they span the history of this cuisine, from enslaved chefs to middle- and upper-class writers and entrepreneurs. If you’d like to buy either (or both) of these books, you’ll find a link in the Kitchen Notes.

The first recipe we’ve chosen to cook from this beautiful book is West African Groundnut Stew, originally published in 1985, in The Africa News Cookbook: African Cooking for Western Kitchens. This book was created by Tami Hultman for the Africa News Service of Durham, North Carolina, to “acknowledge the popular and nutritious peanut and other ingredients and culinary techniques that enslaved Africans had reimagined in the American South,” according to Tipton-Martin.

The groundnuts are, of course, peanuts—as opposed to tree nuts, such as almonds, pecans and walnuts. In the recipe, they are used in the form of peanut butter. It imparts no peanut butter flavor to the dish—it just dials up the umami and provides a silky mouthfeel.

We did not tweak the recipe at all, but made two practical adjustments. It calls for a whole 4-pound chicken; we had bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, so used those. And there being two of us, we halved the recipe and still got two meals out of it. Stew is a perfect name for this dish, a quiet, comforting blend of flavors with no one ingredient taking over. Served with rice, it is an utterly satisfying meal.

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West African Groundnut Stew

From the cookbook Jubilee: Recipes from Two Hundred Years of African American Cooking, this comforting stew features chicken, aromatics, tomatoes, spices and peanut butter.

Course Main Course, Stew

Cuisine Southern

Servings 4 (can be doubled—see Kitchen Notes)

Ingredients

• 2 pounds bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, about 4
• 2 cups water
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 1 large garlic clove, minced
• 1/2 cup diced carrots
• 1 teaspoon salt plus more as needed
• 4 whole black peppercorns
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/4 cup peanut butter
• 2 cups undrained chopped canned tomatoes (a 15-1/2-ounce can will do)
• 1/4 teaspoon fresh minced ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon curry powder
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 2 tablespoons dry white wine (optional)
• freshly cooked rice, for serving

Instructions

• Trim the excess fat from the chicken thighs. Combine chicken, water, onion, garlic, carrots, salt, peppercorns and bay leaf in a soup pot or Dutch oven. Bring to a boil over medium-high flame, then reduce to medium-low and simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes.
• Remove chicken to a plate and let cool slightly. Discard bay leaf.
• In a small bowl, stir about 1/2 cup of broth into the peanut butter and mix until smooth. Add peanut butter mixture to pot, along with the tomatoes, ginger, curry powder, cayenne pepper, crushed red pepper flakes and white wine, if using. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, partially covered, for 20 minutes, to let the flavors meld, skimming off fat with a spoon, if necessary (I didn’t need to do this).
• Meanwhile, cook rice. Also meanwhile, separate the chicken meat from the skin and the bones. Cut the chicken into bite-sized chunks and return to the pot to warm through. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt.
• Spoon rice into bowls and top with the stew.

Kitchen Notes

Double the recipe. This is easy. Use a 4-pound whole chicken, as the original recipe does, or 4 pounds of chicken thighs, then double all the other ingredients as well.

Get the book(s). You can purchase Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, published by Penguin Random House, and The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, published by University of Texas Press, on Toni Tipton-Martin's website.